The shaded lamp burns on, and fitfully the chaos of that room, here and there, is touched by its faint light. A slight sound, a rustling tread is heard, and in a moment, a woman, dressed in black, with a black veil about her face, and the umbrella which had protected her from the storm in her hand, stood beside the sleeper. She evidently had a pass-key, for she walked forward as one accustomed to use it at all hours and confidently.
“The beast! Drunk, dead drunk again!” she muttered. “I shan’t get the money I wanted to-night, that is plain! Curse his obstinacy! After all my trouble to save him, this is my reward! Worse and worse!”
She sprang forward eagerly as her eye fell upon the jewelled miniature that lay before him on the table, and snatched it up. “Ha! this will save me some trouble!” She turned it eagerly over in her hands, throwing back her veil at the same time, to examine the valuable case with vivid glistening eyes, that did not seem to notice in the least degree the exquisite painting within.
“Ah, yes, this is great! Wonder the fool never let me know of it before! I should have had it in Chatham Street before this! Never mind, ‘never too late,’ I see! It saves me the trouble of exploring his pockets and table-drawers to-night, for what is getting to be a scarce commodity. Bah! what silly school-girl face is this? He is falling back to whine about the past. O, that’s all right. I’ll fill his decanter for him! He has done enough. He has fed me for a year. I’ll let the poor wretch off! Yes, I’ve saved him! I have feasted on him!” And she drew herself erect with a triumphant swelling of the whole frame, which seemed to emit, for the moment, from its outline, a keen quick exhalation most like the heat-lightning of a sultry summer sky.
She fills the decanter rapidly from a demijohn she drags from a closet in the room, and places it by his side. She pushes the water-pitcher far beyond his reach, and then steps forward for a moment into the light.
Have we ever seen that face before? No! no! It might have been—there is some resemblance—but this form and face are too full of arrogant abounding strength to be the same faint bleeding victim of ruthless persecution that we saw at first! No! no! It cannot be she! Ha! as she thrusts that jewelled miniature into her bosom and turns to glide away, I can detect that infernal obliquity of the left eye! O, dainty Etherial!
CHAPTER VII.
THE CONVENTICLE OF THE STRONG-MINDED.
Her strong toils of grace.
Shakspeare.
Take we a glimpse now of another interior scene in the strange, mingled life of the great metropolis. In a bare and meanly-furnished but roomy parlor of a house in Tenth Street, near Tompkins Square, we find assembled, on one summer’s afternoon, a group of females. There are perhaps ten of them in all. The characteristic which first strikes the eye, on glancing around this group, is the strange angularity of lines presented everywhere, in faces, figures, and attitudes, except when contrasted with an uncouth and squabby embonpoint, which seemed equally at variance with the physical harmonies, supposed to be characteristic of the sex. What all this meant, you could not comprehend at first glance; but the impression was, of something “out of joint.” Where, or what, it was impossible to conjecture. Some sat with their bonnets on, which had a Quakerish cut about them, though not strictly orthodox. Some, conscious of fine hair, had tossed their bonnets on the floor or chairs, as the case might be. There was, in a word, a prevailing atmosphere of steadfast and devil-may-care belligerence—a seeming, on brow, in hand, and foot, that, demurely restrained, as it certainly was, unconsciously led you to feel that a slow and simultaneous unbuttoning of the cuffs of sleeves, a deliberate rolling up of the same, and a dazzling development of lean, taut tendons, corrugated muscles, and swollen veins, would be the most natural movement conceivable. Not that this bellicose sentiment, by any means, seemed to have found its proper antagonism in the forms and personalities then and there presented; but that you felt, in the vacant reach and persistent abstraction of the expression, that the foe, at whom they gazed through the infinite of space, was not an Individuality, but an Essence,—a world-devouring element of Evil, with which they warred.